Weather and art on your screen? Do it with Locksider+ for Win Phone 8. (Psst it’s free.)

We’ve already covered the much loved app Locksider form Liquid Daffodil, one of the first apps to give your Lock screen some fresh art on an hourly basis (or once a day, if you’re more tame). The app went free for a few days before going to $0.99 and received some great feedback, including a request for weather.

Well, look no more as Locksider+ is now here, which gives you all the same pre-selected images to your phone with the additional option of a weather overlay. Sure, it’s not as robust as Weather Flow, but being able to peek at the current temp as well as the day’s high and low temperature is pretty awesome. It’s also laid out well, not hindering your view of your data and being easily visible.

Locksider’s wallpapers are some of the best around if only because they are formatted for Windows Phone 8 HD displays, meaning you won’t get awkward crops, low resolution pics or images that obscure your detailed data (below the clock). You of course get the same art selection as the original Locksider, including Today, Cool, Geeky, Abstract, Nature and Mellow and the ability to select frequency of updates (every hour, every four hours, twice a day, once a day).

Normally, the app will fetch for $1.49—a $0.50 price hike for the additional weather module. But being Liquid Daffodil, you can grab Locksider+ right now for the low, low price of ZERO. Yup, it’s free through the weekend, so make sure you get that license now, because once you lock it in as free, it’s free for life.

Speaking of the original Locksider app, that too is free as well for the same time period and it too received a minor update to fix a bug that would occasionally erase the app’s settings when exiting. That has now been addressed and the app is back in shape.

You can pick up Locksider+ here and Locksider (without weather) here. Both are free through Monday. And remember, if you like both apps (or any dev’s apps) please remember to leave a positive rating for them in the Store, it really helps them out—especially when they give things away for free like this!

And check out our other recommended Lockscreen Apps that we've covered, right here.

PS The bug fix update for Locksider (original) has *not* gone live yet, so stay tuned. Locksider+ though is a go...

Reader comments

Weather and art on your screen? Do it with Locksider+ for Win Phone 8. (Psst it’s free.)

This app completely drained my battery, easily doubling battery drain. As soon as I turned it off things went back to normal. The weather also didn't show up at all on the locksreen even though it was enabled.

I like to have the image change only once per day, but sounds like that will cause the weather info to also only update once per day, which is a bit useless. Am I wrong about that, or is there a setting to change that?

"You can't get apps in this region. You can check the Windows Phone Store in your home region to see if the app is available there."
Windows Phone Store in my home region (Finland) doesn't have it yet, can't wait...

Hot or cold, sure; but how about cold and frigid? Or warm and hot? A sunny minus 27C day looks exactly the same as a sunny minus 14C day. Those who live in these climates have the "common sense" to check the temperature.

For some reason, the weather isn't showing up for me...I installed Locksider+ off of the QR code and enabled the weather feature. It said fetching location info, then I went back and refreshed the preview: no weather. Locked and turned on the screen, no weather. Went back into the app, turned weather off and on, updated preview, changed background image, no weather. Anyone else having difficulties?

I don't usually rate apps I like, because there aren't that many that really blow me away..... however, this is a really fantastic application, and it gets a good review. The weather information is so brilliant and yet so simple, and I am wondering why this wasn't part of the OS itself to begin with. No matter now, though - and I'm now looking through the developer's other interesting apps (other than gleek) to see what other goodies are in the marketplace too :).

Hey folks, just some quick notes:
#1 The update for the original Locksider update (that fixes the Settings loss) hasn't made it live yet, look for it shortly!
#2 Anytime you set the lockscreen from within the app it will show Fahrenheit until the update happens automatically. The update pending approval does it correctly. Sorry Metric folks! :)
#3 You don't need both apps, although they are both awesome. If you like have a "quick glance" temperature and conditions, get Locksider+, otherwise get the original Locksider.
#4 If you don't want to wait for the original Locksider update to fix the Settings, just get Locksider+ and disable weather and it will be exactly like the original Locksider! :)
Hope you all enjoy! We love our fans!

Right now, the app to beat is the HTC app (sorry Lumia users). It is beautiful and dynamic, but also informative. Perhaps the only thing that I could imagine that would be better would be an app that would let you choose a few of your own images, puts a shade over them, and then provides a lot of different weather information (five day forecast, humidity, barometer, etc) that you can either toggle on or off.

I would love to see a developer make an app that's just weather information for the lockscreen but with several sets of icon, a bit like it's done with Android widgets. Then we'd just have to pick our own wallpaper and be sorted.
Any developer reading this? Jay? :)

It does on mine - very noticably. Had it off the charger for 2 hours and it drained down to 50% and that was the only app I had running in the background. Recharged, repeated, same thing. Recharged, blocked that app - no more drain.

I thought the new phone update had a problem with battery drain. I realized I installed this at the same time. As soon as I turned it off, my battery life went back to normal. I normally have between 40-50% battery left at the end of the day. This app actually compltely drained my phone before the day was over. I disabled it and my phone is back to normal.

Apologize...it says "Title Not Found" and I assumed that, well...it wasn't there. I clicked on "Title Not Found" and it took me there. So is this what we should expect going forward? We should just click on everything to see if it works? Its OK with me, just curious...